How South Vietnam died by the stab in the front

At 8 o'clock on the morning of Saturday, March 15, Tran Van Anh, a shrewd, wiry man of 45 who managed a small ice‐making factory in Pleiku, climbed into his old Dodge truck, which he had bought cheaply from the departing American troops in 1973, and drove to work. He did not notice anything out of the ordinary. Groups of off‐duty South Vietnamese soldiers wandered aimlessly in the potholed streets of the drab, dusty town that served as headquarters for the 20,000 square miles of South Vietnam's Central Highlands. Packs of lean, yellow dogs rooted in piles of uncollected garbage. By the door of the Dong Khanh Hotel, where American G.I.'s on leave had once stayed, the owner, a slight man with a wispy white beard, sat on a chair, as he did every morning, nodding to passers‐by.

True, during the previous week, the North Vietnamese had launched a new offensive, cutting the only two major roads into the highlands, and had seized a town 85 miles south of Pleiku. But in the two years or so since the Paris truce accords, roads had been cut to be reopened, and towns had been lost to be won back. There was nothing to suggest that this day would be one of the most decisive of three decades of struggle for Vietnam. Pleiku was calm.

At noon, a woman whose husband worked in the headquarters, located at the big air base just out town, ran into the ice factory to ask Anh if he had heard that the army was abandoning Pleiku. He hadn't, and he knew how easily rumors could start, but he thought it prudent to consult with his wife. Driving home, he saw people hurriedly packing and preparing to flee.

So Anh loaded his wife and four children onto his three‐quarter‐ton truck, along with a few possessions—mostly rice and bottles of water—and headed south. Even before reaching the edge of town he was forced to stop, again and again, to pick up as many as 40 passengers. They included the local tax collector, a lieutenant in charge of the Pleiku prison and a colonel who commanded the Pleiku garrison. None of them had received any orders, either to stay or to retreat.

Not quite everyone. One of the few people who remained behind was Tu Quoi, the hotel owner. Quoi, it turned out later, was a senior member of the Vietcong.

By nightfall, Pleiku was in flames. The stores were looted. Mutinous soldiers raped women in the streets. The air base was abandoned so precipitously that several dozen planes and helicopters were left intact, along with expensive radar and communications facilities. The only thing the Pleiku provincial chief stopped to do before running himself, in an armored personnel carrier, was to break into the provincial treasury and remove 700‐million piasters, or about $1‐million.

And still there had been no attack on Pleiku by the Communists.

In the summer of 1974, Hanoi's 11‐man Politburo met to assess the strategic situation. The leaders of North Vietnam concluded that President Nixon's resignation, the world‐wide energy crisis and the cutback in American aid to South Vietnam were “highly favorable new factors” that would enable them to deal “decisive blows” and “tip the balance of power” to their advantage. But their plan did not envisage final victory this year. Rather, according to directives local Communist cadres in the South that were captured by the Saigon army troops, 1975 was to be a year in which the Vietcong would score enough gains to achieve one of two goals—either to force President Thieu to set up a coalition government or to put the Communists in a position to win militarily in 1976.

To carry out this plan, Hanoi drew up a threestage offensive.

The first was set for Military Region III, around Saigon and the Mekong River delta; it began in December and made large gains, including the conquest of a whole province on the Cambodian border.

The second, in Military Region II, was designed primarily to cut the roads leading into the Central Highlands; infiltration from the North picked up markedly early in 1975 and reached 1,200 men day—near the record high for the whole war—toward the end of February.

A third‐stage offensive, not fully understood by Western intelligence analysts, was scheduled for May.

But the second phase struck pay dirt. Not only were the highlands dependent on just two roads and hence more vulnerable to attack, but, it developed. the dry rot that was to destroy the South Vietnamese Army in two weeks of contagious panic had proceeded further in the highlands than anywhere else. in fact, Pleiku and its sister cities of Kontum to the north and Ban Me Thuot to the south were a microcosm of all that was wrong with the Saigon regime.

Pleiku's fragile prosperity had been based on catering to the Americans—washing their clothes and their cars, serving them beer, providing pliant women—and with the American withdrawal the city's economy had collapsed. The commander of the military region. Lieut. Gen. Nguyen Van Toan, set about soaking up any money that was left.

A heavy‐set, porcine man, General Toan had once been dismissed as divisional commander after being charged with raping a teen‐age girl. He was not convicted—some say because of his close connections with President Thieu. In earlier days, Toan had won the soubriquet of “the cinnamon general” because of the way he skimmed the profits off the cinnamon trade in a province under his control. He was promoted to the Pleiku command during the Communist offensive of 1972, and, according to local repute, he took his new opportunities so earnestly that one of his deputies, traveling in the general's helicopter, made the rounds of the district chiefs to collect the monthly bribes exacted from the highland woodcutters. Eventually, American officials on the scene reported, the general's demands became so exorbitant that the foresters gave up and went out of business. Toan was dismissed last fall in one of Saigon's anticorruption campaigns, but most of his subordinates remained.

Some of his aides, and perhaps he himself, were involved in the drug business. During a visit to Pleiku in February, I found that heroin was easily available in many coffee shops or in dingy shacks down back alleys. For as little as 70 cents and the words “May I borrow the bow and the sword?” one could get a fix. Some South Vietnamese Rangers said their officers sold the stuff at military outposts. An American official in the Pleiku headquarters reported that lieutenant in Vietnamese intelligence had amassed a small fortune pushing heroin during his off hours; the lieutenant's uncle was the local province chief. Narcotics officals believed most of the heroin was left over from stocks accumulated for sale to American G.I.'s An investigation by the South Vietnamese military indicated that by the time the Communist attacks began in March, as many as 30 per cent of the combat soldiers and airmen in Pleiku were on heroin.

Apart from the corruption, morale was affected by the sharp decline in American aid. With American military spending for Vietnam cut to $700‐million this year, half of what President Ford had requested, there were shortages of everything. Troops in the field were allotted two hand grenades per patrol; 105‐mm and 155‐mm howitzers were limited to firing four rounds a day; helicopter flying hours were cut by 80 per cent to save fuel, and some pilots flew only five or six hours a month. Some fighter‐bombers and helicopters were grounded for lack of spare parts at the Pleiku air base.

More important than the actual shortages was their psychological effect. An army trained to expect unlimited air support and ammunition was not prepared to fight a poor man's war in the jungle. “The little guy in the outpost had to read the handwriting on the wall and know he wasn't going to get air strikes and artillery support when the Communists hit him,” said an American officer who had served many years in the highlands. “So it made sense to bug out.”

By the end of February, the Pleiku command was in possession of some disturbing intelligence. The North Vietnamese had completed building a road through the jungle that virtually encircled Kontum and Pleiku. The road was part of a network of highways the Communists had been constructing in the South since the end of American bombing. Large North Vietnamese units were moving to cut Highway 19 and Route 21, which linked Pleiku and Ban Me Thuot to the coast, and to block Highway 14, which connected the two cities. on March 4, North Vietnamese troops blew up three bridges just where South Vietnamese intelligence agents had said they would.

The new commander in Pleiku, Maj, Gen. Pham Van Phu, a small, ascetic‐looking man who had been captured at Dien Bien Phu as an officer in the French Army, had not taken his agents’ warnings seriously because he was not on good terms with his intelligence officer. President Thieu flew to Pleiku for a briefing, but he did nothing either. The American Ambassador, Graham A. Martin, was away in Washington — lobbying, his aides said, for an increase in American assistance.

By now the Communists must have realized what unexpected opportunities had opened up before their second. stage offensive. All three roads were cut, and at 3 A.M. on March 10 the North Vietnamese struck at Ban Me Thuot itself.

A pleasant town set in one of the country's most majestic tropical rain forests, Ban Me Thuot was a kind of capital of the Montagnards, as the French dubbed them—the ethnically distinct people who inhabit the highlands. Their long houses, set on platforms, surrounded the town. But the Montagnards have never cared for the lowland Vietnamese, North or South, who exploited them and called them Moi, or “savage.” in the past year, rebelliousness had festered among the tribesmen around Ban Me Thuot. When the Communists attacked, the city's defenders, most of them Montagnards, seem to have melted away. The South Vietnamese Air Force mistakenly bombed the local command post, killing the province chief and knocking out communica₭ tions. on March 13, resistance in the city ceased.

In Saigon a momentous strategic decision was in the air. For a long time, American officials and some of his own generals had been urging President Thieu to stop trying to hold on to every populated area possible and to withdraw from exposed and indefensible regions like the Central Highlands. The plan, said to have been drawn up by an Australian officer who had served as an adviser in Vietnam, also called for pulling back from some advanced coastal positions further north, around Hue. it was imperative, the Australian had insisted, that the withdrawal take place by Feb. 15, before the Communists attacked. But Thieu, sitting in his whitewalled office in the Presidential Palace, had hesitated. Cautious, suspicious and slow to decide, he had always surmounted crises by muddling through. Now, with the fall of Ban Me Thuot, the President moved. He conferred with his four corps commanders and, on Friday, March 14, he flew to Nha Trang, on the central coast, for a meeting with General Phu, the new commander of Military Region U. His order: Pull back from the Central Highlands.

But, according to knowledgeable Vietnamese officers, the order was vague in form and without a specific timetable, so necessary if the biggest retreat of the war was to be accomplished in an orderly fashion. in fact, one source close to Thieu is convinced that the President had a political end in view—the hope that a spectacular withdrawal would shock the United States Congress into providing more aid.

On Saturday morning in Pleiku, an American who worked for the United States Defense Attach6's office checked in to see how things were going in the command post for Military Region II. He found it in chaos. “The Chief of Staff was like a vegetable. He had been up for a week without sleep. There were only two or three people in the bunker, and the phones never stopped ringing. When I asked what was happening, they said a decision had been made to cut the corps headquarters in two, with half moving down to Nha Trang and half to stay.” The American, who had served 10 years in Vietnam, was aghast. “All the senior officers were getting ready to go, leaving only the lowest and the worst officers. After that, it only took rumors to get things started.”

By 1 P.M., the half‐dozen American officials in Pleiku had received orders to leave at once. “When we flew out over the town,” the American said, “I could see my house burning and some Vietnamese driving down the road in my car.”

On the second night out from Pleiku, Mr. Anh, the ice factory manager, lost his $200 Rolex watch, his proudest possession, and his wallet. Two South Vietnamese Rangers took them after they jammed their M‐16 rifles into his stomach as he sat by the side of his truck, cooking dinner. “After that, I kept my shirt, pants and shoes hidden in the truck,” he related. “I just wore my underwear. The refugees were more afraid of the Rangers than they were of the Vietcong.”

During his flight along Route 7‐B, an old, disused, bumpy dirt road to Tuy Hoa on the coast, a distance of 135 miles, he was stopped by the Communists seven times. “They never touched a hair on our heads,” he reported. “They were all very young boys, 16 or 17 years old. They just told us to throw away any guns we had, and said we were stupid to run away. ‘Wherever you run, we will be there soon anyway,’ they said.”

All along the road, choked with jungle vines, army trucks coming from behind kept smashing into Anh's truck. “There was no way to get ahead, but they tried to pass anyway.” At one point, when a Vietnamese military police captain got out to try to force his way past, a soldier shot him dead. “After that, all the officers tore off their insignia, but many others were killed too, especially airforce officers. People hated them because they had always demanded huge bribes for rides their planes.”

A somewhat similar explanation was given me in Saigon by a South Vietnamese Army colonel, Nguyen Be, a maverick figure who had long headed the Government's pacification training school: “Under our system, the generals amassed riches for their families, but the soldiers got nothing and saw no moral sanction in their leadership. In the end, they took their revenge.”

The refugees fleeing from Pleiku and Kontum formed a column 20 miles long. One day, when the column bogged down in a traffic pile‐up, Anh saw a man lose all control. “lie and his eight children had no more food and their feet were bleeding. So he borrowed a gun and shot all of them and then himself.”

By March 29, when the column halted before the Song Ba River, even the soldiers had thrown away their uniforms. “There were dozens of tanks and artillery pieces, and soldiers everywhere,” Anh remembered, “but no one tried to organize them to fight.” It took five days for the Vietnamese Army engineers to build a makeshift bridge across the shallow river with parts ferried in by Chinook helicopter — a two‐day job, Anh estimated, if there had been any kind of leadership. The delay gave the Communists time to catch up.

On the morning of March 25, with the bridge finally in place, North Vietnamese mortar and artillery shells began falling among the trucks, cars, Honda motorcycles and oxcarts of the refugee column. One of the shells blew up Anh's truck, killing his wife and children. Anh ran from the burning truck, scrambling over the bodies that littered the road to the bridge.

Out of the estimated 100,000 to 250,000 refugees who began the trek, fewer than 50,000 are thought to have made it to Tuy Hoa. of the remainder, some died of exhaustion or starvation, or of wounds sustained when they were caught in Communist attacks. Others probably gave up or were forced back by the North Vietnamese. of the 314 M‐14 and M‐48 tanks assigned to the Central Highlands, only three got through.

Anh walked the rest of the way to the coast, reaching it 13 days after leaving Pleiku. There he was stopped by local militia, who demanded a bribe to let him pass. “1 told them, I do not care what you do. have been in the land of death.'” They let him go. From Tuy Hoa, it took him a week to reach Saigon by ship. He arrived with nothing but the clothes on his back.

The city of Quang Tri sits on the southern bank of the Thach Han River, a narrow stream that, for all practical purposes, had been the dividing line between North and South Vietnam since the January, 1973, truce accord. The Communists held the territory between the river and the legal border 25 miles further north, and Quang Tri was the scene of the heaviest fighting in their 1972 offensive. The city had been destroyed that year by repeated American B‐52 strikes and by shelling by both sides, and it had never been inhabited after that. Only soldiers lived amid its ruins, the garrison of the country's northernmost outpost

On March 19, while the death marches from the Central Highlands were still in progress, North Vietnamese troops and tanks crossed the Thach Han River and seized Quang Tri. Two days earlier, the province chief, Lieut. Col. Do Ky had advised civil servants to leave if they wished. It was apparently an extension of President Thieu's order for withdrawal from exposed areas that had been applied in the Central Highlands.

Forty miles to the south stood the former imperial capital of Hue, a graceful city that to many Vietnamese represents the spiritual center of the nation—briefly held by the Communists during their 1968 Tet offensive and partially destroyed in the fighting. Quang Tri's sudden loss set in motion a massive flight from Hue. With official encouragement, some 200,000 refugees began pouring down Highway 1, in anything that moved, toward Danang, the country's second‐largest city. President Thieu went on television on March 20 to denounce rumors that Hue was being abandoned. But the local officials were leaving. it was the confusion of Pleiku all over again.

On the night of Monday, March 24, Hue fell after a brief shelling. The remaining Government troops, elements of the highly regarded First Division and the elite Marines, tried to escape over the beaches. Few of the First Division made it. One who did manage to reach Danang was a major who was deputy commander of the division's base camp. “My commanding officer ran away two days ago,” the major said. “But there were never any orders. No orders to fight, no orders to withdraw. I don't even know where my wife is. Why should I care about my unit?”

By now it was becoming clear that Danang itself was in danger. An old port called Tourane by the French, it was the place where French forces first landed to conquer Vietnam in 1858 and where the United States Marines first came ashore in March, 1965. A city of 500,000, it had been the focus of much of the American military involvement in Vietnam, with large Army, Navy, Marine and Air Force bases. And it still had 50,000 Government defenders.

But the influx of 500,000 refugees, from areas just north and south of the city, threw Danang into turmoil. By Wednesday, March 26, with the arrival of large numbers of armed, angry and leaderless troops, panic broke out. There was still food for sale, and tailors in the small openfronted shops near the air base continued to sew new uniforms for soldiers. But high Vietnamese officials began buying up black‐market Air Vietnam tickets to send their families to Saigon, and the United States Consul General. Albert B. Francis, speeded up the evacuation of remaining Americans.

The sight of Americans leaving intensified Vietnamese fears—as it did everywhere, as the end neared. By Friday, March 28, Danang was a scene of looting and disorder. People ran crazily in the streets. Others took houses apart, piece by piece. The Government's rice warehouse and the local brewery were raided. Abandoned cars, with the keys left in them, were stripped, drained of gas and demolished.

Lieut. Gen. Ngo Quang Truong, the military region commander, widely regarded as South Vietnam's finest combat leader, ordered a 24‐hour curfew and told his military police to shoot looters on sight. But at 7 P.M. the same day, General Truong went aboard a Vietnamese Navy ship. His guards sacked his house and peddled his rice. whisky and other stocks in the street.

Mutinous soldiers closed the main airport. At an old United States Marine landing strip nearby, they pushed, fought and shot their way aboard the last Air America evacuation planes. President Thieu, according to knowledgeable Vietnamese officers, radioed an urgent order to General Truong to hold Danang at all costs, but nobody felt like transmitting the order to the general.

A little after 8 P.M., the North Vietnamese began shelling the city along the beaches, where soldiers were desperately trying to get aboard the few boats standing offshore. The next morning, backed by tanks, the Communists drove into the city with hardly a shot. The streets were strewn with abandoned helmets, uniforms and guns and lined with empty jeeps, trucks and tanks.

South of Danang lay Quang Ngai, one of the poorest and most bitterly fought‐over provinces in the country, scene of the My Lai massacre of 1968. After the fall of Pleiku on March 15, the Quang Ngai province chief, Col, Le Van Ngoc, attended a special conference in Danang. There, Premier Tran Thiem Khiem, the country's No. 2 leader, had reassured him that Danang and the whole northern part of the coast, including his province, would not be abandoned. Colonel Ngoc returned to the city of Quang Ngai the provincial capital, and issued stern orders: Any civilians who fled would be shot. As late as the morning of March 24, he insisted at a meeting with all his officers that “we will fight to the last man.” But at 7:30 P.M. the same day, he ordered his men to burn their files and to set out in a convoy for the headquarters of the Second Division, 20 miles to the north. The colonel gave no notice to Quang Ngai's civilians that he was leaving, but the word spread. By the time the first jeeps and tanks headed up Highway 1 in the darkness, there were thousands of townspeople on the road with them. They covered no more than five miles before running into the first

“The Communists were lying on top of a ridge,” recalled Le Tam, a former soldier who had worked as an interpreter for the American military in Quang Ngai. “They kept shooting and rolling grenades down at us until they ran out of ammunition. There were bodies everywhere. I had to drive my Honda over the bodies. My wife and 14‐month‐old daughter were killed. I was hit too, though I didn't know it until several hours later, when passed out from loss of

On the morning of the same day, a North Vietnamese PT76 tank, accompanied by a company of infantry, clanged down a side road into Tam Ky, capital of Quang Tin province, just to the north. The tank was lost, it later turned out, and was looking for the rest of its armored unit. But the deputy commander of the South Vietnamese Second Division, Col. Hoang Tich Thong, and the province chief, Col. Dao Mong Xuan, jumped into their jeeps and headed out of town. By mistake they drove in the wrong direction and bumped into the North Vietnamese tank. The tank did not fire, and the colonels turned around and fled. Within minutes, all of Tam Ky's defenders—a regiment of the Second Division, three battalions of Rangers, an armored squadron, two artillery batteries, eight battalions of regional forces and several thousand local milita—followed suit.

With the loss of the Central Highlands, Hue, Danang and most of the central coast, and with the fear and disorder spread by the refugees and renegade soldiers, it was as though someone had tugged at the loose end of a giant skein of yarn. The whole thing just came unwound. By the beginning of April, the Saigon Government had lost half its 1.1‐million‐man army (including six of its 13 regular infantry divisions), a large part of its air force (once the fifth largest in the world) and two‐thirds of its territory (Qui Nhon and Nha Trang, the two remaining port cities on the central coast, fell on March 31 and April 1).

The Communists, on the other hand, had suffered minimat casualties — there had been almost no real fighting—and they moved quickly to bring down all but one of their eight reserve divisions from North Vietnam. They were so confident that they gave safe‐conduct passes to captured South Vietnamese soldiers, allowing them to return to Saigon. At two points on the capital's defense perimeter—Xuan Loc, a shabby rubber‐plantation town 40 miles to the northeast, and Highway 4, leading to the Mekong River delta—Government defenders fought bravely for two weeks, inflicting heavy losses. But the powerful North Vietnamese forces outflanked them and kept on moving.

In Saigon, the Presidential Palace was strangely silent. President Thieu had retreated further into gloomy isolation. A disgruntled South Vietnamese F‐5 pilot made an unsuccessful bombing attack on the palace on April 8, and Thieu moved from his secondfloor office to a basement bunker. “Everyone there is paralyzed, giving commands without thinking of how to carry them out,” said Hoang Duc Nha. Thieu's nephew and once his closest adviser. Another official, an Americantrained economist, reported that he had been ordered to spend his time drawing up plans for a duty‐free shop at Saigon's Tan Son Nhut airport. Incredibly enough, General loan, the man who had been fired from the Pleiku command for corruption, was the new commander of military.

Region III around the capital.

At the American mission, Ambassador Martin, back from his lobbying in Washington, continued to insist that Saigon could be held. “There is no danger to Saigon,” he told an astonished American businessman on April 10. The businessman promptly made plans to leave. An aloof, secretive and complex man, the 62‐year‐old Ambassador was playing a difficult game. if he gave in to pressures from Washington to begin an evacuation of Americans and those Vietnamese who faced reprisals from the Communists for working with the United States, it could prove to be a mortal blow to the Saigon regime. Some associates thought that Martin, who had long ruled the Embassy with an iron hand, insisting on favorable reporting about President Thieu, had been influenced by the death of his son, a helicopter pilot shot down in Vietnam. on April 12, with North Vietnamese troops only 40 miles away, Martin fired the senior United States Air Force officer in Vietnam, Brig. Gen. Richard M. Baughn, for secretly beginning to evacuate Vietnames employes of the defense Attaché's office.

With a new division moving down almost every day, the North Vietnamese now had an estimated 26 divisions in the South. on April 20, Ambassador Martin finally acceded to an order from Washington to start the withdrawal. According to reports at the time, he also drove the few short blocks from the Embassy to the Presidential Palace to put pressure on Thieu to resigr It was part of the final American illusion in Vietnam—that a face‐saving political settlement could be snatched from the jaws of defeat. Seizing on hints from Hanoi, a message from Leonid Brezhnev and word from the French, all implying that a deal could be arranged if only Thieu were removed, American diplomats and intelligence agents made the rounds of Saigon pressuring, cajoling and entreating Vietnamese politicians and generals to accept the Vietcong's terms.

But when Thieu, in his first and last significant action during the weeks of debacle, resigned on April 21, the Vietcong denounced his successor, Tran Van Huong, the 71‐year‐old former Vice President. When Huong turned over power to Duong Van Minh, a retired general known popularly as “Big Minh,” a respected figure the Vietcong had long appeared to regard as acceptable, the Communists respcnded less than an hour later with a strongly worded attack on him by Hanoi Radio—and with a surprise bombing of Tan Son Nhut air base by A‐37 fighters captured from the South Vietnamese. on the morning of Sunday, April 27, the North Vietnamese fired five 122‐mm. rockets into Saigon, burning down a slum of 500 houses and leaving 5,000 people homeless. At 4 A.M. on Tuesday, April 29, they carried out the heaviest rocket and artillery attack of the war on Ton Son Nhut air base, even though some 200 Vietcong delegates to the abortive 1973 truce structure were housed there. As the sun rose a brilliant red and explosions continued to rock downtown Saigon, I was surprised to see people standing at their windows. They were listening to General Minh's speech, appealing for a cease‐fire, being rebroadcast over the loudspeakers in the streets.

After President Ford ordered the final evacuation and the drama of Vietnamese desperate to escape was played out (whether Anh made it I don't know), an American diplomat aboard one of the ships of the Seventh Fleet steaming toward the Philippines would comment on the last American diplomatic effort in Vietnam. “The Communists never intended to have a political settlement. It was just to throw Saigon into confusion. We were no more capable of understanding Hanoi at the end than at the beginning. We always saw what we wanted to see.”

What had happened since the first panic in Pleiku had happened so suddenly and overwhelmingly that many Vietnamese, with an infinite. capacity for suspicion born of years of clandestine warfare, believed that President Thieu had struck a secret deal with Hanoi. But, clearly, there was no deal. And, in the end, the collapse was the product not so much of the Communists’ plans or prowess in battle as of the inherent weaknesses of the South Vietnamese Army and South Vietnamese society —poor leadership, corruption, a system of promotion based on personal loyalty rather than ability, and above all the lack of any unifying goal or ideology beyond the old Confucian ideal of the family. When the crunch came, there was nothing to bind officers to their men or men to their officers. All those years of American aid had never touched the heart of the matter.

After Saigon fell, after it was all over, I spoke to a young South Vietnamese pilot, one of those who flew their helicopters out to the United States Seventh Fleet, standing offshore. “The Communists did not win, we beat ourselves,” said the pilot, staring over the ship's railing to where the coast line was sinking in the flat green sea. “We are a country that destroyed itself.” ■

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A version of this archives appears in print on May 25, 1975, on Page 210 of the New York edition with the headline: How South Vietnam died by the stab in the front. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe